Seamus Heaney - To a Dutch Potter in Ireland - Poetry Analysis

To a Dutch Potter in Ireland for Sonja Landweer The poem is dedicated to Sonja Landweer, born in 1933 in Amsterdam, resident in Ireland since the late 1960s; a creator of ceramics, jewellery and sculpture, Landweer exhibited in Ireland and internationally. She and Seamus Heaney shared a mutually inspirational friendship over many decades including a joint exhibition in Kilkenney entitled ‘Out of the Marvellous’. Heaney dedicates a two-poem sequence to her, celebrating creativity, resurrection and indomitable human spirit adding a version of a short poem written by a Dutch poet who described the agonies of nazi repression in WWII and the jubilation of freedom. Heaney’s history of creative writing and his cautious hopes that the current truce will lead to peace in Ulster are continuous with the final phrases of Bloem’s poem. The poems are preceded by an italicized epigraph describing a visit to a potter’s storeroom. The picture is […read more….]